Posts Tagged 'Ipv4'

As you may have seen earlier in the week, SoftLayer is joining ISOC's 24-hour IPv6 "test flight" as a part of World IPv6 Day on June 8, 2011.

As I alluded in ISOC's press release, SoftLayer is a hosting provider, but we aren't going to be an effective resource for our customers if we don't adopt the newest technologies and platforms for future growth. Because we've built our business around that idea, you won't see many substantial changes when June 8 rolls around ... We were a little ahead of the curve in December 2008 when we began providing native IPv6 support to our publicly available services. The point of this Internet-wide event is not about getting there first, though ... It's about everyone getting there.

What does World IPv6 day mean to you? Probably little to nothing in the short-run. While there's a unanimous sense of urgency to be prepared, the real deadline is still a little ways into the future. If you're a SoftLayer customer, it's pretty easy for you to take part in your own World IPv6 Day: Provision your free IPv6 /64 on your server and start using them.

I encourage you to set goals for IPv6 functionality for the near future so you don't find yourself scrambling for a solution when you can't get any new IPv4 addresses. Don't let the fact that ARIN still has 5.20 IPv4 /8s in aggregate lull you into inaction ... The well will run dry, and the sooner you're ready for it, the better. Would your business be ready to flip the switch to IPv6 on June 8?

As Kevin mentioned on Friday, we are less than 45 days from "doomsday." The IANA only has about 3% of the resources required to sustain our current way of life. 6.8 billion people with only 4.3 billion addresses in existence. It's the 2012 saga in 2011: The exhaustion of the Internet's available IP version 4 (IPv4) addresses. What are we going to do?!

Luckily, a lot of people have been hard at work to mitigate the impending Internet crisis. IP version 6 (IPv6) is on the horizon and is already supported by most modern internet enabled devices. If you're like me, the fact that we went from IPv4 to IPv6 might make you wonder, "What happened to IPv5?"

The powers that be didn't decide to rid the number system of the number five because of its mixture of curves and right angles, and it wasn't because they only wanted to use round numbers. IP version 5 (IPv5) was a work in progress and part of a family of experimental protocols by the name of ST (Internet Stream Protocol). ST and later ST-II were connection-oriented protocols that were intended to support the efficient delivery of data streams to applications that required guaranteed data throughput.

An ST packet looks very similar to its IPv4 sibling, and both use the first 8 bits to identify a version number. IPv4 uses those 8 bits to identify IPv4 packets, and ST used the same 8 bits to identify IPv5 packets. Since "version 5" was spoken for, the next iteration in IP advancement became version 6.

If you've been around the SoftLayer blog for a while, you already know a fair bit about IPv6, but you're probably wondering, "What’s next?" How do you actually start using IPv6 yourself?

1. Get a Block of IPv6 Addresses

Lucky for you, the SoftLayer platform is IPv6 ready, and we're already issuing and routing IPv6 traffic. Obtaining a block of public IPs from us is as easy as logging into the portal, pulling up the hardware page of a server and ordering a /64 block of IPv6 IPs for $4/mo per subnet ($10 if you want a portable subnet)!

For those of you that have ordered IPs from us in the past, IPv4 addresses are usually $0.50-$1.00 each. To get a /64 of public static IPv6 addresses, it’s a whopping $0.00 for the entire range. So just how many IPs is in a /64? 256? Try again. 512? Keep going. 1 Million? You’re still cold. Let's try 18.4 quintillion. For those that understand scientific notation better, that is 1.84 x 1019. If you just want to see the number written in long form, it's 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 IP addresses. That allocation should probably tide you over for a little while.

2. Make Sure Your Server is IPv6 Ready

Most current server operating systems are ready to take the IPv6 leap. This includes Windows 2003 SP1 and most Linux OSes with 2.6.x Linux kernels. We'll focus on Windows and RedHat/CentOS here.

Once IPv6 is installed, IIS will automatically support IPv6 on your web server. If a website was running when you installed the IPv6 stack, you must restart the IIS service before the site begins to listen for IPv6 requests. Sites that you create after you enable IPv6 automatically listen for IPv6. Windows 2008 server should have IPv6 enabled by default.

When your Windows server is ready for IPv6, you will add IPv6 addresses to the server just as you'd add IPv4 addresses ... The only difference is you will edit the properties to the Internet Protocol Version 6 (TCP/IPv6) network protocol.

To ready your RedHat/CentOS servers, do this:

Using your favorite editor, edit /etc/sysconfig/network and enable NETWORKING_IPV6 by changing the "no" to a "yes."

Once you have successfully added your assigned IP addresses, you must restart networking with this command:

[root@ipv6test /]# service network restart

Once you have completed these steps on your respective OS, you should be able to communicate over the IPv6 stack. To test, you can ping ipv6.google.com and see if it works.

3. Bind Your New IPv6 Address to Apache/IIS

Now that you have more IPv6 addresses for your server(s) than what's available to the entire world in IPv4 space, you must bind them to IIS or Apache. This is done the similarly to the way you bind IPv4 addresses.

In IIS, all IPs that have been added to the system will now be available for use in the website properties. Within Apache, you will add a few directives to ensure your web servers is listening on the IPv6 stack ... which brings us to a very important point when it comes to discussing IPv6. Due to the fact that it's full of colons (:), you can’t just write out the IP as you would a 32-bit address.

IPv6 addresses must be specified in square brackets or the optional port number could not be determined. To enable Apache to listen to both stacks on separate sockets you will need to add a new "Listen" directive:

4. Add Addresses to DNS

The final step in getting up and running is to add your new IPv6 addresses to your DNS server. If you're using a IPv6 enabled DNS server, you will simply insert an 'AAAA' resource record (aka quad-A record) for your host.

5. Test Your Server's IPv6 Accessibility

While your DNS is propagating, you can still test your webserver to see if it responds to the IP you assigned by using square brackets in your browser: http://[2101:db8::a00:200f:fda7:00ea]

This test, of course, will only work if your computer is on a IPv6 network. If you are limited to IPv4, you will need sign up with a tunnel broker or switch to an ISP that offers IPv6 connectivity.

After about 24 hours, your server and new host should be ready to serve websites on the IPv6 stack.

THE SKY IS FALLING! EVERYBODY MOOOOOOVVVVEEEE! WWWHHHYYY??!! OH THE HUMANITY!!!

Are those your reactions to the depletion of IPv4 space? Probably not. If you haven't seen the IPv4 Exhaustion Rate countdown in the sidebar of SoftLayer.com, head over there and check it out ... At the current rate, there will be ZERO unallocated IPv4 blocks by the middle of February 2011, and that's not a good thing for the Internet as we know it.

Will you need to move your servers into a bomb shelter to protect your now-even-more-valuable IP addresses? Will Google stop Googling? Will there be riots in the streets as over-caffeinated sysadmins flip cars and topple dilapidated buildings in pursuit of lost 32-bit addresses? What does it really mean for you as a hosting customer and web surfer?

The sky won't fall. Your servers are safe in their data centers. Google will still Google. Sysadmins will still be working hard at their desks. But the belt is going to start tightening, and after a while, it might get pretty uncomfortable.

What's Really Happening

All of these IPv4 Exhaustion Rate counters are loosely tracking the IPv4 space that hasn't been allocated by the International Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to a Regional Internet Registry. The Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) are ARIN (USA and Canada), LACNIC (Latin America, South America and Caribbean), RIPE NCC (Predominantly Europe and Russia), AFRINIC (Africa) and APNIC (Asia Pacific).

When the IANA gives out its last block of IPv4 addresses, every available IPv4 address will be allocated to one of these registries. And that's when the fun will really start. Since SoftLayer operates primarily out of the United States of America, for simplicity's sake, we'll use ARIN as we talk about the next steps for RIRs.

Anyone who's requested large blocks of IPv4 space in the past few years can attest to the significant changes in the request process. Additional justification is required, you have to be using a certain percentage of the IPv4 space you've already been provisioned and you have to get in line.

When the IANA IPv4 address space is exhausted, regional registries like ARIN will still have space available, and that space is all they're going to get. As a result, it'll probably be even harder to get get large blocks of space from those registries.

SoftLayer requests IPv4 space from ARIN for our customers. As ARIN slows the distribution of IPv4 space with additional requirements, it'll be more difficult for providers like SoftLayer to get additional space. In the same way ARIN orders IPv4 space to have stock for SoftLayer to request, SoftLayer has a pool of IPv4 addresses already assigned to us that we provision to our customers' servers.

In Short:

ARIN won't be able to get any more IPv4 space from IANA.

It will be more difficult for SoftLayer to get IPv4 space from ARIN.

It will be more difficult for customers to get IPv4 space from SoftLayer.

How long will ARIN be able to maintain a reserve of IPv4 in the midst of qualified need in the region? How long will SoftLayer continue to receive requested IPv4 address blocks from ARIN? How long will SoftLayer's pool of IPv4 addresses last for our customers? These questions don't have definite answers yet, but for ARIN and SoftLayer, the general answer is "As long as possible."

What Does that Mean for You?

In the short term, it depends. If you find yourself in need of a huge block of IPv4 addresses, you're going to run into a lot more trouble. If you're just ordering a server and need one public IPv4 address, you might not notice much of a difference. If you're somewhere in between, you might see a few changes as we tighten our belts in response to the belts above us being tightened.

In the long term, it means you should prioritize IPv6 adoption. You can run IPv6 in parallel with IPv4 on your SoftLayer servers, and we'll do our best to help you understand how to implement IPv6 in your environment. IPv6 needs to be in the back of your mind as you create new applications and prepare to scale your business.

Consider the possibility that you'll never be able to get another IPv4 address when IANA runs out of IPv4 space. What will that do for your business? How would that change your development priorities? What are the IPv6 plans for the mission-critical hardware/software vendors you use?

IPv6 traffic is only a small fraction of overall Internet traffic right now, but you can be sure that as IPv4 space is harder and harder to come by as you move down the funnel, IPv6 traffic is going to grow exponentially. The work you do in preparing for that will need to be done now or later. It's a lot easier to start working on it now than to wait until you need it ... by that time, it'll already be too late.

On February 4th, 2009, I told you that IPv4 address space is running out and that IPv6 is here to replace it.

As of this writing, there are about 218 days worth of IPv4 address space remaining, and the usage rate is still accelerating. Before you know it, there won’t be any more new IP space to allocate, and between now and then you will see much more strict rules applied to handing out addresses.

Of course these rules are not imposed by SoftLayer, but by IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. IANA controls IPv4 address space that is doled out to regional registries. IANA already imposes some pretty hefty regulations on how and when IPv4 space is handed out, but the regional registries in some cases are even more difficult to obtain addresses from.

This is by design, and is (despite frustrations otherwise) a good thing. If IANA had not put regulations in place or tightened the regulations as we went along, we would have run out of addresses quite a long time ago. Long before IPv6 was ready. Just to put it into perspective- there are more internet-connected devices in the world today than there are IPv4 addresses and an estimated 22 billion by 2020.

As I mentioned 21 months ago, SoftLayer has native IPv6 support on all networks in all datacenters. We also give you IPv6 address space in large chunks, and free of charge.

Since then, my home ISP provides me native IPv6 support across the wire, and my home PCs all have IPv6 addresses on their interfaces. In the event that websites or network services report an “AAAA” record in DNS, my systems at home prefer the IPv6 path over the IPv4 path. My personal servers share an IPv6 /64 subnet.

While the address space is waning, IPv4 isn’t going to die because of it. Not yet, at least. As more people adopt IPv6, it will tend to free up IPv4 address space for those of us who still enjoy playing old games or using old software that cannot or will not ever be updated for the new protocol.

Before the addresses run out, before new sites come online that are forced to use IPv6 with no native IPv4 access, check to see if your ISP for your home or business is already providing you native IPv6 capability. If they don’t, pick up a phone and ask why. If they don’t know, choose a new provider.

SoftLayer already has you covered. And we have a countdown timer on the home page www.softlayer.com to keep you up to date.

Everyone is complaining about the price of gas at the pump. It’s a plain fact that it cost more than it used to fill up. Why is that? If you picked a handful of economists at random you will likely get a different story from each of them. One often mentioned of late is the oil speculators market. Not being a business guy, I hadn’t really ever paid attention to the oil futures market; much less the futures market in general. The speculation on oil prices got me thinking. Why do people think oil is going to go up in the future?

Most likely because it is a finite resource, and at some point it will become unobtainable through reasonable means. I personally think that the advances in technology will keep the black gold flowing for quite a while, but I am no where near naïve enough to believe that an infinite amount of oil can be contained within the finite confines of the globe we call Earth. Still, there is enough out there either undiscovered or untapped to keep our civilization plugging along well after Al Gore has melted all the ice caps with his private jet.

This led me to consider the impending depletion of the IPv4 address pool. Unlike the supply of magical natural resource oil, the available IPv4 address space cannot be augmented by new technology. There are no hidden underground caches to be found. It’s not like an expedition of the coast of Chile will stick a pipe in the ground and IP addresses will start spewing out. For IPv4, what you see is what you get, and what I see is the last 20% of a shrinking pool.

In theory, the answer is easy. Everyone just needs to jump on the new IPv6 train instead of riding around in their old fashioned IPv4 cars. The practicality of that solution is not quite that simple. That fancy IPv6 train is very limited right now. It currently requires special tracks, and they only go certain places, none of which is grandma’s house. Ultimately, user demand will force local ISPs to start supporting IPv6. In the great dance known as capitalism, they ISPs will bow to user demand and provide this service. However, between now and that future lies a pinch.

It’s that last squeeze of toothpaste before you have to run to the store and get another tube. The hosting industry, being the most voracious of IPv4 address consumers, is actively working towards IPv6 deployment. The real question is how long until the home ISPs start supporting it. All the address space in the world doesn’t help if the consumers can’t browse there. And to that end, doesn’t all that legacy IPv4 address space become a precious commodity? In the not so distant future, is there a speculative market for IPv4 real-estate? I see it as a real possibility. I just wouldn’t want to be the one owning that venture when the last telecom announces IPv6 support.

The three P's in the hosting world have always been Ping, Power and Pipe. Salespeople regurgitated them relentlessly and operations personnel just shortened them to the P's because we talked about them all the time. The three P's of hosting have changed in the recent years and those not aware of the changing landscape are doomed for failure. I propose a new three P standard (described below).

1) Power -- I list this one first because it is by far the most important. Power is the single greatest limiting factor to technology. If you don't understand the importance of power on future technology, you should exit the industry now. If you are not concerned with power, don't meter power and not fixated with power, you will be in serious trouble in the next 12 to 24 months. The entire industry has shifted to being "green" and large scale datacenter operators are so focused on power utilization, they are building and designing systems completely based on power usage and/or location. It's one of the most critical operating costs and must be understood to maximize long term success and profitability. Here at SoftLayer, we are obsessed with power utilization and efficiency and focus on mitigating power and heat (byproduct of power) to a bare minimum. We know the power usage of every server and network device located in the datacenter and track it real time. We are continuously seeking new low power technologies, engaged in industry consortiums looking for new alternatives, and actively planning our power needs through the end of 2010.

2) Packets -- Five years ago, the internet backbones were full of big fat packets that were easily passed by backbone and edge routers without issue. In the recent years, small packet technologies have greatly reduced the size of the average packet transversing the internet. For those of n00bs out there, smaller packets reduce the overall throughput of the routers processing the packets. The smaller the packets, the greater the reduction in horsepower of those routers. The fast rise in gaming, VOIP and other small packet intense applications has cut the average packet size in half in the last two years and I would expect that to occur again the next two years. Packet size can take the aggregate throughput of a router from several hundred gigs at large packet sizes to potentially single digits of gigabit throughput due to the processing required. Here at SoftLayer, we have installed and upgraded to the fastest routing technologies by Cisco to ensure the greatest network performance, but there are many legacy carrier, broadband, and enterprise routers out there that have limited capacity due to changing packet size. Hosting providers that were built on eBay surplus network equipment from the late 90's will soon begin to implode.

3) IP's (IP Addresses) -- Ok…not really a "P" but I take a little creative leeway here. IPv4 addresses are disappearing faster than norm's plate at the Hungry Heifer. ARIN has publically announced the need to shift to IPv6 and numerous articles have outlined the D-Day for IPv4 space. Most experts agree, its coming fast and that it will occur sometime in 2010 at the current pace (that's about two years for those counting). IPv6 brings enough IP space for an infinite number of users along with improved security features and several other operational efficiencies that will make it very popular. The problem lies between getting from IPv4 to IPv6. We are caught in this "chicken and egg" scenario where we can't leave one without the other being completely reliable. Although I think we will get to IPv6 without too much of a headache, I do think the IPv4 space will become extinct prior to a full scale transition and there will be a time where the cost of IPv4 IP's will skyrocket because of supply/demand. This should be at the top of your list as a hosting provider because additional IP space typically means new customer and/or expansion of existing customers. If you don't have a conservation plan for IPv4, migration plan for IPv6, and transition plan between the two – you may already be too late. Here at SoftLayer, we have been planning for over a year and 2008 will include a rollout of IPv6 to all those customers who seek to run dual stacks and will include incentives to customers who are able to shift to IPv6 completely.

The Three P's will likely change again in a few years as the industry continues to evolve and we find a way to solve the current challenges facing the industry. For now, focus and plan on these three and you should have a long successful existence.